Email marketing Archives - Page 11 of 89

Dela Quist is founder and CEO of Alchemy Worx, the largest UK agency with a 100% focus on email, he is a thought leader and one of the UK’s leading email marketing practitioners. He has pioneered research into the “Nudge Effect” of unopened email, and the surprising effectiveness of longer subject lines. His clients include Tesco, The Carphone Warehouse, Hilton Hotels and Lilly.

Dela will be among the keynote speakers at the upcoming Fusion Marketing Experience event on March 23rd, 2011 in Brussels, Belgium.

Dela is considered a “thought disruptor” and describing him as provocative might be an understatement. Recently, I sat down with him for a chat about email and online marketing…

Email is the only channel which is not controlled by someone else

Dela doesn’t take many prisoners and when asked about the value of marketing via other channels such as Facebook, he certainly didn’t pull any punches! Some quotes and thoughts…

“Email is the only channel which is not controlled by someone else – it’s only controlled by the consumer. With every other channel you have to pay someone to reach those customers. We’re all excited that Facebook has 500 million users. Do you know why they have half a billion users? So they can charge you to reach them.

We’re all excited about Google search, but Google search is all about paying Google billions of dollars to reach people you already know because you have their email address.

TV is about paying a broadcaster a lot of money so you can reach their customers. So, with every other channel, the customer is owned by somebody. We’re excited about paying that person, we’re excited about paying Facebook, we’re excited about paying Twitter and we’re not excited about the fact that we can reach these people for nearly free if we do our job correctly.

All of those channels use email and the prime way of driving traffic back to them. Without email, Facebook wouldn’t exist because only a small percentage of Facebook’s customers are there every minute. The only thing which drives them is an (email) alert.

So my challenge regarding social and the excitement around it is this: We’re going to use our email list to drive our customers to a site that’s owned by someone else who is going to charge us to reach them in future.

Even if they don’t charge us to reach them because they’re on my fan page, guess who they’re going to be selling advertising on that fan page to? Your competitors! It seems to me that it’s a kind of suicide. I have these people on my list and I’m really excited to send them to my fan page where my competitors can reach them also. This doesn’t make sense to me.”

As I said: provocative. What do you think?

When given a choice I believe most people will choose enhanced reality over virtual reality just about any day. Rather than travel within the virtual, people want technology to travel with them in the real world. So, with the surge of smartphones and other mobile devices, marketers either need to get mobile or get left behind.

A recent comScore survey backs up the call to mobile, demonstrating there does indeed seem to be a shift towards mobile email usage, especially among younger users. comScore found that the number of visitors in November 2010 to web-based email sites declined by 6 percent in comparison to November of last year and email engagement declined at a greater rate. Meanwhile, the percentage of those who checked their email from mobile devices rose by 36 percent.

According to comScore, fewer Americans overall visited web-based email destinations and spent less time doing so, versus last year. In November 2010, more than 153 million people visited web-based email services. Total minutes spent were down nine points from last November and total pages viewed dropped by 15 percent. comScore is quick to point out that email is still one of the web’s most popular activities and reaches 70 percent of the US online population each month. It’s not dying, it’s just evolving.

Again, we see the sharpest decline among the younger users, with the 12-17 demographic number of visitors to web-based email providers dropping by 24 percent. Engagement fell almost by half with a 48 percent decline. In fact, among the younger web users, engagement is down by varying degrees across the board.

While younger people seem to be moving away, older folks seem to be using email more with a 16 percent increase in visits for the 55-65 demographic and an eight percent increase in visits for the over 65 age group.

It seems the predictions of 2011 being the year of mobile for marketing may be right. Comparing November last year to November of this year, comScore recorded an increase of 36 percent in the number of people who state they used email via a mobile device. Those who access email every day via a mobile device rose by 40 percent.

Mobile email usage grew by double-digits across all age demographics. Again, not surprisingly, the younger age groups were more likely to use mobile compared to older segments. From a gender perspective, males were 14 percent more likely to use mobile email.

The data we are seeing continues to illustrate the importance of mobile in online and email marketing. Optimizing your campaigns and strategy for mobile marketing is simply no longer a consideration, but an absolute necessity.